stories of my family

Archive for the tag “james andrew ross”

“… the eviction concerned twenty two families who were the residue of the much greater population which had been cleared in the name of the octogenarian landlord, the notorious Major Robertson of Kindeace… The people’s record was stainless; nor were they a penny in arrears. Some of the menfolk of Greenyards were currently serving in the 93rd regiment at Sebastopol in the Crimean War. The community was under notice of removal to make way for sheep.” (Richards p.345)

The eviction achieved notoriety and was labelled “the massacre of the Rosses” by a contemporary writer, Donald Ross, because of the injuries sustained by a number of people, mostly women, who resisted the authorities who came to turn them out. The Sheriff of Tain and thirty five men arrived at dawn on the 31st of March and were met by a crowd of some 300 people (although Donald Ross’s estimate of the number in the crowd was much lower). The newspaper reports of the Greenyards events created a sensation in Scotland.

“The basic facts of the case:… a body of baton swinging police… ploughed into a crowd of women, and they… inflicted severe, almost fatal, wounds upon them. The police sustained no injury… it was undoubtedly a trial of strength between the peasantry of Ross-Shire and its police force… In the aftermath four of the people [taken into custody] at Greenyards were sentenced at the Circuit Court in Inverness to a long confinement and hard labour in prison. One year later (February 1855) the clearance at Greenyards was completed, to the accompaniment once more of allegations of cruelty, but without resistance.

“A civil force had been brought in from Tain. The furniture of the evictees was put out into the nearby fields; the fire in the hearth was extinguished and the inmates were ejected like a band of felons. One bedridden woman was placed, in her bed, in the open air, exposed to the piercing cold in intense frost and snowstorm until she was rescued by a neighbour from across the Carron.” (Richards pp.351-352)

This event occurred just a few miles up the valley from Gledfield, where James Ross and his family lived. By 1854 James was around 60 years of age and his sons had taken over the smithy. The twenty two families who were evicted were their near neighbours, even if they lived in the valley and not in the village. James and his family would have known many of them, as the people of the Strathcarron generally passed through Gledfield on their way to the bigger centres of Ardgay, Bonar Bridge, Tain, Dingwall and Inverness. James and his sons were the village blacksmiths and had much contact with the people of the valley.

James had been born in or around the so called Year of the Sheep (1792) when the men of Ross had gathered in Strath Oykel to drive the invading sheep south. He was a young man in 1820 when the Strath Oykel Clearance took place after a confrontation at Culrain, just up the road from his home. In 1845 he watched as the people of Glencalvie left the Strathcarron, driven away by the above named Major Robertson, who owned the land. Finally in 1855 he saw his neighbours from Greenyards pushed out by the same laird. James had raised a family of 13 children. By that time his son James had already left Scotland and was married and living in Wales. Two years later, in 1857, two others of his children, Andrew and Helen, would leave Scotland and migrate to Australia, where both would marry and raise families in the beautiful Bellinger Valley of New South Wales. Eleven years after Andrew and Helen left, his son James, who had moved to Birkenhead, near Liverpool in the intervening years, would also leave for Australia with his wife and children. The youngest daughter, Jane, 22 at the time, sailed with them. James senior died in Gledfield later that same year, 1866. He had seen the departure of many people from his beloved valley, the Strathcarron. Some had been driven away, evicted from the land by apparently heartless landlords. Others, including four of his own children, had left of their own freewill. His son James settled in Sydney, Australia, and his granddaughter, Winifred Ross, was my grandmother.

In the winter of 1819-20, the word went around that the people of Strath Oykel were to be evicted. Snow lay on the ground during that January of 1820, but it was a fertile valley; in the summer the area “was beautiful… a green valley floor watered by the black run of the River Oykel, rich pastures rising in gentle slopes to the south. The townships to be cleared lay on the west bank of the Kyle of Sutherland at Culrain…” As Prebble points out in his book, “this was the glen where the Men of Ross had gathered in 1792 before setting out on the great sheep drive… The memory of The Year of the Sheep was perhaps stronger in this strath than anywhere in Ross. The people had another reason for their pride, and for thinking that their laird and the Government were in their perpetual debt. During the Napoleonic Wars the county had supplied more than two thousand five hundred men for the three battalions of the 78th Regiment, RossShire Highlanders… Strath Oykel had sent its youth with the rest of Ross…” (Prebble J, p.121-2)

Culrain is just a few miles north of Gledfield, where my ancestor James Ross was the village blacksmith during those sad years of the Clearances. Culrain is reached from Gledfield these days by a road that first crosses the Carron River and then winds up through forest, over a ridge and down into the next valley. The Kyle of Sutherland, the westerly extension of the Dornoch Firth, is a narrow body of water down on the right side of the road as it descends toward Culrain. These days a railway line runs along the edge of the Kyle, and at Culrain there is a little country station; in 1820 there was no railway, but the road led northwest to the Oykel Ferry, near Achnagart, the main crossing to Sutherland Shire prior to the building of the Bonar Bridge in 1812. Nowadays the ferry is gone and the railway crosses the Kyle where the ferry used to be. Culrain is something of a backwater, though there is a railway station there, and a youth hostel and a scattering of houses; cars and trucks heading north miss both Gledfield and Culrain by taking the newer northward route from Ardgay over the Bonar Bridge into Sutherland Shire. Even Bonar Bridge is much less busy now, since a long causeway across the Dornoch Firth further east opened in 1991, which spans the water between Tain and Dornoch, carrying the vast bulk of traffic heading northward from Inverness, completely missing the area at the inland end of the firth which was once such a busy thoroughfare.

It is likely that by 1820 James Ross, in his mid to late twenties, was already living in Gledfield, and that the business was thriving. He had not yet married his future wife, Catherine Urquhart of Golspie, the town over which the Duke of Sutherland’s stately home, Dunrobin Castle, presided. It is probable that Jame knew many of the people of Strath Oykel who were evicted. He would have been very aware of what was happening to his friends that dark cold winter, and he could hardly have avoided being deeply affected.

Novar House. Wikipedia

The landlord who owned the lands of Strath Oykel was a man named Hugh Munro, a few years younger than James Ross. Munro had inherited the Novar Estate from his uncle, Hector Munro, who had made his name serving in the British Army in India. Hector’s two sons had both met rather dramatic and tragic deaths in India – one after being attacked by a tiger, and the other by a shark in the Bay of Bengal. Hector had been the landlord of Novar at the time of the 1792 troubles. Novar House lies very close to Alness, near where the men of Ross had abandoned the sheep on the ill-fated drive south.

When Hector died without a male heir in 1805, Hugh took over the estate. He had a keen interest in art and was a great fan of the renowned English artist, JMW Turner, from who he commissioned a number of paintings. Even as a young man Hugh Munro was an art collector, like his protege Lord Stafford, the Duke of Sutherland. However, his financial resources were nothing like those of the wealthy owner of Dunrobin Castle, and his passion for collecting art required a steady source of income, more than his estates were providing him at that time.

Hugh Munro lived in a different world to the Gledfield blacksmith, even if their homes were only a few miles apart. Hugh probably had little interest in his estate more than as a source of income for his art collection. He probably knew little of the people who inhabited his estate. James, however, knew the valley of Easter Ross intimately, and lived his whole life there. It is likely that he knew many of the families evicted from the settlements in the Strath Oykel. While Hugh Munro was educated at Oxford (though he never took a degree) and lived the society life of the British aristocracy, James Ross learnt the trade of smithing and lived out his life in his little Highland village. Hugh died in 1864 and James two years later. Hugh presumably spent much time in England, whereas James never left Ross Shire.

Hugh never married but the estate that he owned passed to his cousin when he died and remains very much in the family, today a destination for luxury hunting and fishing holidays, and a delightful location for Highland weddings. James, on the other hand, married, and had 13 children, but there are few traces to be found of his family apart from the ruins of his old forge and a few proud family gravestones in the Kincardine churchyard. The two sons who carried on the family business after James died in 1866, Malcolm and then Hector Ross, both died childless. The need for blacksmiths was diminishing by the end of the First World War and once Hector was too old to carry on the shop fell into disrepair. Now there are just a few walls still standing. Four of the Ross children migrated to Australia, but the lack of male offspring resulted in the Ross name disappearing from their family lines.

Like many of the landed gentry of the Highlands Hugh Munro came to believe that sheep were more profitable than people, and like many others he decided to clear his lands of the people inhabiting the best land. Through January of 1820 snow had fallen intermittently on the valleys of Easter Ross, but in the darker corners of the forests where the insipid winter sun hardly reached, the snow lay deep in drifts. Winter was always a tough time for the crofters of Strathcarron and Strath Oykel, marked by the familiar anxiety of hunger; but with luck and planning the people were able to survive on their stores until warmth returned to the earth in April and May, bringing life back to the cold north. This winter, however, another kind of anxiety lay like a dark snow cloud over the valley – the worry about evictions.

In early February their fear materialised when the laird’s law agent turned up in the valley, together with witnesses, carrying Writs of Removal to be presented to all the tenants and their dependents, warning them to be ready to quit by Whitsunday. Word of their coming had gone before and there was an angry crowd waiting to meet them. The law agent and his witnesses “were maltreated and pillaged of their papers,” according to a report in the Inverness Courier. They were driven off the property, through the snow and from the glen, and threatened with bodily harm if they returned.

James Ross, the young blacksmith of Gledfield, heard about the confrontation and wondered what would become of it. He felt sure that the laird, Hugh Munro, would not let things lie after such an open defiance of his rights and authority. James had seen what had happened to the lands owned by Lord Stafford, the Duke of Sutherland to the north, and felt certain that the same fate was coming to Ross-Shire. He didn’t have long to wait before the next chapter in the story unfolded before him. A month later to the day, on the second of March, he was witness to the old Sheriff of Dingwall, a certain Mr Mcleod of Geanies, who had come over the hills from the south, on his way north to Strath Oykel.

It is hard to be sure which way the road ran in 1820. Nowadays to get to Culrain from Ardgay requires passing through Lower Gledfield, which was called Gledfield back then. However, looking at an old map from around that time the road seems to go more directly and to bypass Gledfield, following the route that the railway now follows across the Carron River. The railway did not exist then, but perhaps there was a road bridge where the line crosses now.

1925 map. The road from Ardgay to Culrain passes through Gledfield before crossing the Carron River. In 1820 the road appears to have followed the present day railway line.

The road from Ardgay to Culrain nowadays runs right past the ruins of the old blacksmith shop before crossing the fields to a high stone bridge across the Carron River. If Sheriff McLeod took that route he would have passed right by James Ross’s little business. But even if the road in 1820 was a mile or so further east, the people of the little settlements of Ardgay and Gledfield could not ignore the Sheriff’s process. For he was not alone.

McLeod was 73 years of age in 1820. He had been Sheriff in Dingwall for a long time, even before the debacle of 1792, the Year of the Sheep, 28 years before. When informed of the fate of the Law Agent and his witnesses he knew that he would have to jump once again into action, since it was his duty to maintain law and order in this little corner of the Highlands. He apparently appealed to the authorities for a military force from the garrison at Fort George, near Inverness. He was clearly worried about the strength of resistance he might meet. The records suggest that he even asked for artillery, as if he was going to war. In retrospect this sounds ridiculous, and even at the time it was regarded as an over-reaction and the request was declined. It does however reflect the excessive level of anxiety that Sheriff McLeod felt in confronting the Highlanders.

One of McLeod’s achievements during all the years of his service in Dingwall had been to establish a local militia, the Easter Ross Regiment, based at Dingwall. McLeod was its colonel. The permanent staff consisted of 25 red-coats, and these were rapidly mobilised. In addition McLeod called on the local constabulary, and managed to recruit 40 volunteers. Many of the local gentry, outraged as they were by the insolence of a peasantry who dared to defy them, were keen to ride with McLeod’s little army, and a large party of them turned up with their servants. Hugh Munro was almost certainly among them. All told perhaps 80 or 90 men marched or rode from Dingwall on a cold and grey Thursday, the 2nd of March, four weeks after the Law Agent had been rebuffed and sent on his way.

It is perhaps twenty miles from Dingwall to Culrain and it is hard to imagine the Sheriff and his men covering that distance on a winter’s day. However, if they left early while it was still dark, and kept up a steady pace, they could probably cover the distance in 7 or 8 hours. Had they departed at 6am they would have passed Gledfield in the early afternoon and got to Culrain by four or five. The Sheriff rode in a carriage, the soldiers were presumably on foot, and the gentry were mounted.

The word of their arrival had come to the valley long before they did and when the Sheriff climbed out of his carriage he was met by a “great crowd of people gathered on the road and on the brae side. There appeared to be more women than men… There was a great deal of noise, the women shouting and crying, young boys blowing whistles or horns to summon the laggards from the valley behind… There were also observed many men running down the hill on the Sutherland side towards the Ferry, with the apparent desire of crossing to assist their neighbours…” (Prebble, p124)

I have found myself wondering as I have read this account of the Culrain confrontation whether James Ross was there that day. He was not about to be evicted, but like the people of Sutherland who came to support the threatened crofters he may well have felt a degree of sympathy for them and their plight. James’ business came from the people of the valleys, and he must surely have known some of them. Somewhere between five and six hundred people were expected to vacate their homes, sub tenants of the three major tenants in the area: John Munro of Culrain, Duncan Kennedy of Achnagart and John Ross of Kilmachalmack. Even if James did not know many he would surely have known the names of these three men, who themselves were to be turned out. He may well have crossed the ridge to Culrain to support them. He was a young man, unmarried, and may have been an activist. The evictions that were happening in those days were known far and wide. There were even some among the “gentry” who felt more sympathy toward the peasants than toward the landlords. One such was a man named Thomas Dudgeon, who lived in Frear, between Edderton and Gledfield. He was seen by his fellow “gentlemen” as being a troublemaker and a nuisance. He was there in the weeks after Culrain. The crofters were surely glad to have at least him on their side.

John Prebble’s description continues (p.125):

Old McLeod got down from his carriage, waving the Writs of Removal, and immediately the crowd pressed upon him and the wall of constables and militia. He shouted to them to disperse, but the women cried back desperately. They shouted, “We must die anyway!”… Better to die here than in America or on The Cape of Good Hope. “We don’t care for our lives!”

A fight ensued, largely with sticks and stones, the constables and gentry striking the women with their sticks and riding crops. The militia fired a blank volley, then “gathered around their colonel with the butts of their muskets swinging.” Then one young militiaman, who had chosen to go against orders and load his musket with ball and not blank cartridges, fired into the crowd. The shot struck a woman in the chest. She fell to the ground, dead.

With things rapidly spiralling out of control the Sheriff decided to withdraw, and his soldiers were glad to escape the maddened women. They picked their colonel up bodily and carried him away, leaving his carriage behind to be overturned and kicked in by the Strath Oykel people. The Writs of Removal were torn up and scattered in the wind. The Sheriff and his men retreated the four miles back to Ardgay chased by men, boys and bloodstained women. There they barricaded themselves in the Inn, the people throwing stones at the windows before returning home in triumph. The Sheriff made the Inn his headquarters for the following week, half expecting the people to return and storm the place, but they never came. The revolt was over.

Twelve days later, in an extraordinary reversal, seven of the principal tenants of Strath Oykel went to the Inn, together with the minister of their parish and accepted the Writs of Removal. What had caused this turn around? Certainly not the urging of the gentleman Thomas Dudgeon of Frear, who had rather tried to stir the people to greater anger.

Rather it had been the effect of the sermonising of that very same minister, a certain Reverend Alexander Macbean, the vicar of the parish of Kincardine. He had gone from one end of the valley to the other preaching a message of submission to the law of the land, a law which enshrined the rights of the landlords far above the those of the tenantry. It is true that the Minister was incensed by the violence of the police and the militia towards his parishioners, and he roundly condemned the Sheriff for the way he had conducted the affair. But at the same time he preached obedience, making it clear that disobedience to the law in this case was paramount to rebellion against God, and that the result of such rebellion was the fires of hell. It was this vicar who eventually got the tenants to write a letter to James Aird, the Ground Agent of Novar, asking him to meet them at the Inn with new Writs of Removal. They met him there on the 14th and accepted the papers. The Sheriff and his little army returned to Dingwall, the crisis past. Two months later, with the Spring bringing warmth and life back to their beloved valley, the people left, over 400 of them.

Did James Ross have a part to play in these dramatic events or was he a silent bystander? Did he take in any of the departing people as they began their journeys to places unknown? There are no records of his household before the 1841 census, so these questions are impossible to answer. But James could hardly have been unaffected. A year or two after the Culrain revolt he married Catherine Urquhart, a Sutherland lass from Golspie. How did he meet her? Was she too affected by the Clearances?

There was further trouble in 1821 at Gruids, in Sutherland, just five miles north of Culrain and ten miles west of Golspie. This was the work of Lord Stafford. The eastern valleys of Ross and Sutherland were being emptied of people. The townspeople of these shires like James Ross and Catherine Urquhart were not directly affected but they saw the sorry crofters drift through their villages and towns. Among the displaced were friends and relatives. The Highland way of life that stretched back generations was being changed. A rift had arisen between the rich and the poor. The clan loyalty that had characterised the Highlands for centuries was disintegrating. Poor people were wondering increasingly what the future of the Highlands would look like. The young began to wonder about starting new lives in distant lands. James Ross may have been one, though he lived his whole life in Gledfield and is buried with his wife in the Kincardine churchyard. But as he and his wife raised their family together over the ensuing decades the future of the Highlands and the prospects of a life further away was surely a frequent topic of conversation.

The clearance of Strath Oykel was the first blow in the fight for the glens of Easter Ross. It was over twenty years before the next blow was struck.

The present day bridge across the Carron River between Gledfield and Culrain.

According to John Prebble there were two periods of major clearances in the Highlands, the first from 1782 to 1820, and the second from 1840 to 1854. My ancestors came from Ross-shire, which was the scene of unrest during both of those periods. The first coincides roughly with the early life of James Andrew Ross, who became the blacksmith of Gledfield and the second with his children’s formative years. James and his wife Catherine, though never evicted themselves, saw the worst of both periods and experienced the effects on their little Highland community as well as their family.

The Year of the Sheep
In the year that my ancestor, James Andrew Ross, was born, in Edderton, on the Dornoch Firth, two hundred men of Ross-Shire took matters into their own hands and decided to drive the sheep back to where they had come from – the South. When the history books were written, that year, 1792, became known as The Year of the Sheep.

The introduction of sheep farming to the north dated back to the 1760s. The lairds who owned the land had begun to realise that using their land for sheep runs which they could rent to farmers from the south would provide more profit than collecting seemingly paltry rents from lots of poor tenants. They needed to clear their lands of people whose families had lived there as subsistence farmers for centuries. These people, as poor as they might have been, were traditionally fiercely loyal to the lairds on whose lands they lived, lairds who were in many cases related to them. The Highlands were well known for this clan loyalty. But by the 1780s it was becoming clear that the loyalty of the poor towards the rich was not reciprocated. The lairds were happy to drive them out and seldom seemed to care what happened to them.

As the evictions began to take place, the tenants and subtenants whose homes and lives were threatened had trouble believing what was happening. The lairds engaged henchmen, known as “factors,” to turn the people out. Although the lairds often spoke of providing new homes and employment for their displaced tenants, in the majority of cases they did nothing for them, and when they did something the alternatives they offered were often simply not viable. Usually the factors just forced them to leave and were deaf to all pleas for mercy. The lairds hoped that the poor would simply disappear, and encouraged emigration, sometimes providing financial assistance to get rid of them. The poor were in the way, and the rich wanted them gone.

The ordinary people, the crofters, may have struggled to comprehend what was happening, but they had the evidence of the sheep wandering over the hills before their eyes. In the minds of some, the sheep became the enemy; perhaps that was psychologically easier to accept than that their traditional leaders should be simply casting them aside. They saw that they were being displaced by sheep, and it was easier to direct their anger towards the hapless creatures than toward their traditional fathers of their clans. A series of events in 1792 catalysed the crofters of Ross Shire into action.

During the summer of that year a dispute had arisen on the hills between the Dornoch and Cromarty firths, just south of where Donald and Ann Ross lived in the village of Edderton. The land was owned by a Hugh Munro, but he had rented it to two tenants who were intent on using it for grazing sheep. However, many local people were already utilising the land to graze their cattle, as they and their ancestors had for as far back as they could remember. The two tenants wanted these people and their cattle out of the way. They impounded the cattle and demanded that the subtenants pay a fine to have them released. This was refused and a group of crofters set the cattle free. The tenants backed down but lodged a complaint with the authorities.

Encouraged by this success of the small man against the big, at the end of July about 200 people, including many men of Ross, gathered further north, near the Kyle of Sutherland, with the intention of rounding up the sheep, and driving them out of the Highlands. Over the following eight days, the first week of August and the height of summer, they drove an enormous flock southward over the hills behind Kincardine and thence down toward Alness on the Cromarty Firth near Dingwall. The local authorities responded to this blatant defiance of law and order by forming a local militia and going out to hunt the trouble makers down; but when they descended on the camp of the sheep stealers they found it abandoned, the sheep wandering unattended on the hills. The ringleaders were eventually caught, however, and two trials ensued in Inverness; in the second of these seven men were found guilty, with sentences ranging “from fines and imprisonments to seven years’ “transportation” to being banished from Scotland for life.” (Sawyers J, Bearing the People Away, p 258)

The Rosses of Edderton
James Andrew Ross was born in the midst of the first major Clearance period, which according to Prebble lasted from 1782 to around 1820. He may even have been born that very summer, as the sheep were being driven over the hills near his home. Although I have placed his birth in the same year as the famous sheep drive, it is hard to be certain of exactly which year he was born, since the three census records which record his age (Scotland census 1841, 1851 and 1861) while clearly referring to the same person, each indicate a different year of birth, between 1792 and 1798. It seems certain, however, from these same records, that he was born in Edderton. His father was probably a blacksmith, since this is the trade that James later followed. His parents were probably Donald Ross and Ann Fraser, for though I have not seen any documentation that verifies this, James named his first two children Donald and Ann, presumably after his own parents.

Donald and Ann Ross of Edderton probably had other children, but I have no records of their names. The family appear to have been townsfolk and not crofters, but they almost certainly spoke Gaelic as their native tongue, and their roots were firmly placed in the Highlands of Ross-Shire. What eventually became of James’s parents I don’t know. But they were keenly aware of the events that unfolded in the summer of 1792, as was everyone who lived on the Dornoch Firth, and in the glens and mountains to the west.

Edderton lies on the road between the big town of Tain, at the seaward end of the Dornoch Firth, and the smaller villages of Kincardine, Ardgay, and Gledfield at the mouth of the Carron Valley, the Strathcarron, as it is called. Between Edderton and Kincardine, a road branches off from the coast road to Tain and winds up and over the barren heights to the south, and then descends toward Alness on the Cromarty Firth. This road follows the route taken by the sheep and the men that drove them south in the summer of 1792.

I have no records to suggest that anyone of the Ross family of Edderton were among the 200 men who gathered to drive the sheep south. However, they were witness to the great sheep drive, for the noisy flocks coming from the north were clearly visible during that week for all who lived around Edderton and Kincardine, and even before they appeared, the word had been passed around that there was something big afoot. How much the Rosses identified with the threatened crofters is impossible to know, but they must have wondered, as did everyone, what would become of the poor people turned out of their homes. Where would they go and how would they survive?

The future blacksmith of Gledfield may have been born in the year of the great sheep drive, or maybe shortly after, and he grew up with stories of that fateful week firmly etched into his memory. He could see, like many, that life in the Highlands was changing, and he wondered what it would all come to. He heard about what was happening in Sutherland to the north, on the lands of Lady Stafford and her husband, and in other places in the Highlands. Throughout his childhood and adolescence things remained calm in his little corner of Ross-Shire, but he wondered how long it would be before the clearance madness would come to Easter Ross, whose valleys and hills he knew and loved so well. He learnt a trade – as a blacksmith – and looked for somewhere to set up shop, deciding on Gledfield, at the mouth of the Strathcarron and near the road north to Sutherland. Then in 1820, the tragedy that was unfolding across the Highlands broke out in Ross-Shire, with the first evictions, at Culrain just up the road from his home. A few years later James would marry Catherine Urquhart, of Golspie in Sutherland. In 1823 their first child, Donald, was born in Gledfield.

Looking south from Bonar Bridge. Beyond Ardgay and Kincardine the sheep were driven up over the hills south toward Dingwall.